Essays on Russian Novelists

by William Lyon Phelps

  Leonid Andreev is at this moment regarded by many Russians as theforemost literary artist among the younger school of writers. He wasborn at Orel, the birthplace of Turgenev, in 1871, and is thus onlytwo years younger than Gorki. He began life as a lawyer at Moscow, butaccording to his own statement, he had only one case, and lost that.He very soon abandoned law for literature, as so many writers havedone, and his rise has been exceedingly rapid. He was appointedpolice-court reporter on the Moscow "Courier," where he went throughthe daily drudgery without attracting any attention. But when hepublished in this newspaper a short story, Gorki sent a telegram tothe office, demanding to know the real name of the writer who signedhimself Leonid Andreev. He was informed that the signature was nopseudonym. This notice from Gorki gave the young man immediateprominence. Not long after, he published another story in the Russianperiodical "Life;" into the editor's rooms dashed the famous criticMerezhkovski, who enquired whether it was Chekhov or Gorki that hadselected this assumed name.

  Andreev himself says that he has learned much from Tolstoi, the greatTolstoi of the sixties and seventies, also from Nietzsche, whom hereads with enthusiasm, and whose most characteristic book, "AlsoSprach Zarathustra," he translated into Russian. He has read Poe withprofit, but he testifies that his greatest teacher in composition isthe Bible. In a letter to a young admirer, he wrote: "I thank you foryour kind dedication. . . . I note that in one place you write aboutthe Bible. Yes, that is the best teacher of all--the Bible."*

  *Most of the biographical information in this paragraph I have takenfrom an interesting article in "The Independent" for 29 July 1909, byIvan Lavretski.

  Andreev has the gift of admiration, and loves to render homage wherehomage is due, having dedicated his first book to Gorki, and his storyof "The Seven Who Were Hanged" to Tolstoi. His style, while marked bythe typical yet always startling Russian simplicity, is neverthelessentirely his own, and all his tales and plays are stamped by powerfulindividuality. He is fast becoming an international celebrity. Histerrible picture of war, "The Red Laugh," has been translated intoGerman, French, and English, two of his dramas, "Anathema" and "To theStars," have been published in America, and other of his short storiesare known everywhere in Germany.

  The higher the scale in human intelligence, the more horrible and themore ridiculous does war appear. That men engaged in peaceful andintellectual pursuits should leave their families, their congenialwork, their pleasant associations, and go out to torture and murdermen of similar tastes and activities, and become themselvestransformed into hideous wild beasts, has a combination of horror andabsurdity that peculiarly impresses a people so highly sensitive, sothoroughly intellectual, and so kind-hearted as the Russians. AllRussian war-literature, and there is much of it, points back toTolstoi's "Sevastopol," where the great novelist stripped warfare ofall its sentiment and patriotic glitter, and revealed its dull, sordidmisery as well as its hellish tragedies. What Tolstoi did for theCrimean War, Garshin did for the war with Turkey in the seventies. Ihave not seen it mentioned, but I suspect that Andreev owes much tothe reading of this brilliant author. Garshin was an unquestionablegenius; if he had lived, I think he might have become the realsuccessor to Tolstoi, a title that has been bestowed upon Chekhov,Gorki, and Andreev, and has not yet been earned by any man. But likenearly all Russian authors, he suffered from intense melancholia, andin 1888 committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. His short story"Four Days on the Field of Slaughter" first brought him into publicnotice. One cannot read Andreev's "Red Laugh" to-day without thinkingof it.

  "On the edge of the wood there was visible something red, floatinghere and there. Sidorov fell suddenly to the ground and stared at mein silence with great, terrified eyes. Out of his mouth poured astream of blood. Yes, I remember it very well." This is the "redlaugh" of Andreev, though until the appearance of his book it lackedthe appropriate name. Garshin describes how a Russian soldier stabs aFellah to death with his bayonet, and then, too badly injured to move,lies for four days and nights, in shivering cold and fearful heat,beside the putrefying corpse of his dead antagonist. "I did that. Ihad no wish to do it. I wished no one evil, as I left home for thewar. The thought that I should kill a man did not enter my head. Ithought only of my own danger. And I went to him and did this. Well,and what happened? O fool, O idiot! This unfortunate Egyptian is stillless guilty. Before they packed them on a steamer like herrings in abox, and brought them to Constantinople, he had never heard of Russia,or of Bulgaria. They told him to go and he went."

  In the "Diary of Private lvanov," Garshin gave more pictures of thehideous suffering of war, with a wonderful portrait of the commanderof the company, who is so harshly tyrannical that his men hate him,and resolve to slay him in the battle. But he survives both open andsecret foes, and at the end of the conflict they find him lyingprostrate, his whole body shaken with sobs, and saying brokenly,"Fifty-two! Fifty-two!" Fifty-two of his company had been killed, anddespite his cruelty to them, he had loved them all like children.

  Garshin wrote other tales, among them a poetically beautiful story ofa tree, "Attalea Princeps," that reminds one somewhat of Bjornson. Buthis chief significance is as a truthful witness to the meaninglessmaiming and murder of war, and his attitude is precisely similar tothat of Andreev, and both follow Tolstoi.

  Andreev's "Red Laugh" ought to be read in America as a contrast to ournumerous war stories, where war is pictured as a delightful andexciting tournament. This book has not a single touch of patrioticsentiment, not a suggestion of "Hurrah for our side!" The soldiers areon the field because they were sent there, and the uninjured are tooutterly tired, too tormented with lack of sleep, too hungry andthirsty to let out a single whoop. The first sight of the "Red Laugh"reminds us of the picturesque story of Napoleon's soldier thatBrowning has immortalised in the "Incident of the French Camp."Tolstoi mentions the same event in "Sevastopol," and his version of itwould have pleased Owen Wister's Virginian more than Browning's. InAndreev there is no graceful gesture, no French pose, no "smilingjoy"; but there is the nerve-shattering red laugh. The officer whotells the story in the first half of the book narrates how a youngvolunteer came up to him and saluted. The appearance of his face wasso tensely white that the officer enquires, "Are you afraid?" Suddenlya stream of blood bursts from the young man's body, and his deadlypale face turns into something unspeakable, a toothless laugh--the redlaugh.

  In this gruesome tale of the realities of war, Andreev has givenshocking physical details of torn and bleeding bodies, but true to thetheme that animates all his books, he has concentrated the maininterest on the Mind. Soldiers suffer in the flesh, but infinitelymore in the mind. War points chiefly not to the grave, nor to thehospital, but to the madhouse. All forms of insanity are bred by thehorror and fatigue of the marches and battles: many shoot themselves,many become raging maniacs, many become gibbering idiots. Every manwho has studied warfare knows that the least of all perils is thebullet of the enemy, for only a small proportion are released by that.The innumerable and subtle forms of disease, bred by exposure andprivation, constitute the real danger. Andreev is the first to showthat the most common and awful form of disease among Russian soldiersis the disease of the brain. The camp becomes a vast madhouse, withthe peculiar feature that the madmen are at large. The hero of thestory loses both his legs, and apparently completely recovered inhealth otherwise, returns home to his family, and gazes wistfully athis bicycle. A sudden desire animates him to write out the story ofthe Japanese war; in the process he becomes insane and dies. Hisbrother then attempts to complete the narrative from the scattered,confused notes, but to his horror, whenever he approaches the desk,the phantom of the dead man is ever there, busily writing: he can hearthe pen squeak on the paper.

  No more terrible protest against war has ever been written thanAndreev's "Red Laugh." It shows not merely the inexpressible horror ofthe battlefield and the dull, weary wretchedness of the men on themarch, but it follows out the farthest ramifications flowing from thecentral
cause: the constant tragedies in the families, the lettersreceived after the telegraph has announced the death of the writer,the insane wretches who return to the homes they left in normalhealth, the whole accumulation of woe.

  The first two words of the book are "Madness and Horror!" and theymight serve as a text for Andreev's complete works. There seems to besome taint in his mind which forces him to dwell forever on theabnormal and diseased. He is not exactly decadent, but he is decidedlypathological. Professor Bruckner has said of Andreev's stories, "I donot recall a single one which would not get fearfully on a man'snerves." He has deepened the universal gloom of Russian fiction, notby descending into the slums with Gorki, but by depicting life as seenthrough the strange light of a decaying mind. He has often beencompared, especially among the Germans, with Edgar Allan Poe. But heis really not in the least like Poe. Poe's horrors are nearly allunreal fantasies, that vaguely haunt our minds like the shadow of adream. Andreev is a realist, like his predecessors and contemporaries.His style is always concrete and definite, always filled with thesense of fact. There is almost something scientific in his collectionof incurables.

  The most cheerful thing he has written is perhaps "The Seven Who WereHanged." This is horrible enough to bring out a cold sweat; but it isredeemed, as the work of Dostoevski is, by a vast pity and sympathyfor the condemned wretches. This is the book he dedicated to Tolstoi,in recognition of the constant efforts of the old writer to havecapital punishment abolished. No sentimental sympathy with murderersis shown here; he carries no flowers to the cells where each of theseven in solitude awaits his fate. Nor are the murderers in the leastdegree depicted as heroes--they are all different men and women, butnone of them resembles the Hero-Murderer of romance.

  The motive underlying this story is shown plainly by the author in aninteresting letter which he wrote to the American translator, andwhich is published at the beginning of the book. "The misfortune of usall is that we know so little, even nothing, about one another--neitherabout the soul, nor the life, the sufferings, the habits, the inclinations,the aspirations, of one another. Literature, which I have the honour toserve, is dear to me just because the noblest task it sets before itselfis that of wiping out boundaries and distances." That is, the aim ofAndreev, like that of all prominent Russian novelists, is to study thesecret of secrets, the human heart. And like all specialists in humanity,like Browning, for example, he feels the impossibility of success.

  "About what's under lock and key,Man's soul!"

  Farther on in his letter, we read: "My task was to point out thehorror and the iniquity of capital punishment under any circumstances.The horror of capital punishment is great when it falls to the lot ofcourageous and honest people whose only guilt is their excess of loveand the sense of righteousness--in such instances, conscience revolts.But the rope is still more horrible when it forms the noose around thenecks of weak and ignorant people. And however strange it may appear,I look with a lesser grief and suffering upon the execution of therevolutionists, such as Werner and Musya, than upon the strangling ofignorant murderers, miserable in mind and heart, like Yanson andTsiganok." Spoken like Dostoevski!

  These seven are an extraordinary group, ranging from calm, courageous,enlightened individuals to creatures of such dull stupidity that onewonders if they ever once were men. Each spends the intervening daysin his cell in a different manner. One goes through daily exercises ofphysical culture. One receives a visit from his father and mother,another from his old mother alone. There is not a false touch in thesentiment in these painful scenes. The midnight journey to the placeof execution is vividly portrayed, and the different sensations ofeach of the seven are strikingly indicated. At the last, Musya, who isa typical Russian heroine in her splendid resolution and boundlesstenderness, becomes the soul of the whole party, and tries to helpthem all by her gentle conduct and her words of love. The whole spiritof this book is profoundly Christian. One feels as if he were takenback in history, and were present at the execution of a group of earlyChristian martyrs. There are thousands of women in Russia like Musya,and they are now, as they were in the days of Turgenev, the one hopeof the country.

  In Merezhkovski's interesting work "Tolstoi as Man and Artist," theauthor says: "We are accustomed to think that the more abstractthought is, the more cold and dispassionate it is. It is not so; or atleast it is not so with us. From the heroes of Dostoevski we may seehow abstract thought may be passionate, how metaphysical theories anddeductions are rooted, not only in cold reason, but in the heart,emotions, and will. There are thoughts which pour oil on the fire ofthe passions and inflame man's flesh and blood more powerfully thanthe most unrestrained license. There is a logic of the passions, butthere are also passions in logic. And these are essentially OUR newpassions, peculiar to us and alien to the men of former civilisations.. . . They feel deeply because they think deeply; they sufferendlessly because they are endlessly deliberate; they dare to willbecause they have dared to think. And the farther, apparently, it isfrom life--the more abstract, the more fiery is their thought, thedeeper it enters into their lives. O strange young Russia!"

  Merezhkovski is talking of the heroes of Dostoevski; but his remark isapplicable to the work of nearly all Russian novelists, and especiallyto Chekhov and Andreev. It is a profound criticism that, if oncegrasped by the foreign reader, will enable him to understand much inRussian fiction that otherwise would be a sealed book. Every one musthave noticed how Russians are hag-ridden by an idea; but no one exceptMerezhkovski has observed the PASSION of abstract thought. In somecharacters, such as those Dostoevski has given us, it leads to deedsof wild absurdity; in Andreev, it usually leads to madness.

  One of Andreev's books is indeed a whole commentary on the remark ofMerezhkovski quoted above. The English title of the translation is "ADilemma," but as the translator has explained, the name of the storyin the original is "Thought (Mysl)." The chief character is aphysician, Kerzhentsev, who reminds one constantly of Dostoevski'sRaskolnikov, but whose states of mind are even more subtly analysed.No one should read this story unless his nerves are firm, for theoutcome of the tale is such as to make almost any reader for a timedoubt his own sanity. It is a curious study of the border-line betweenreason and madness. The physician, who rejoices in his splendidhealth, bodily vigour, and absolute equilibrium of mind, quietlydetermines to murder his best friend--to murder him openly andviolently, and to go about it in such a way that he himself willescape punishment. He means to commit the murder to punish the man'swife because she had rejected him and married his friend, whom sheloves with all the strength of her powerful nature. His problem,therefore, is threefold: he must murder the man, the man's wife mustknow that he is the murderer, and he must escape punishment. Hetherefore begins by feigning madness, and acting so well that hismadness comes upon him only at long intervals; at a dinner-party hehas a violent fit; but he waits a whole month before having anotherattack. Everything is beautifully planned; he smashes a plate with hisfist, but no one observes that he has taken care previously to coverthe plate with his napkin, so that his hand will not be cut. Hisfriends are all too sorry for him to have any suspicion of a sinisterintention; and his friend Alexis is fatuously secure. Not so the wife;she has an instinctive fear of the coming murder. One evening, whenall three are together, the doctor picks up a heavy iron paper-weight,and Alexis says that with such an instrument a murderer might break aman's head. This is interesting. "It was precisely the head, andprecisely with that thing that I had planned to crush it, and now thatsame head was telling how it would all end." Therefore he leads Alexisinto a dispute by insisting that the paper-weight is too light. Alexisbecomes angry, and actually makes the doctor take the object in hishand, and they rehearse his own murder. They are stopped by the wife,who, terror-stricken, says that she never likes such jokes. Both menburst into hearty laughter.

  A short time after, the doctor crushes the skull of Alexis in thepresence of his wife. In the midst of the horror and confusion of thehousehold, the murdere
r slips out, goes home, and is resting calmly,thinking with intense delight of the splendid success of the plan, andof the extraordinary skill he had shown in its conception andexecution; when, just as he was dropping off to sleep in deliciousdrowsiness, there "languidly" entered into his head this thought: itspeaks to his mind in the third person, as though somebody else hadactually said it: It is very possible that Dr. Kerzhentsev is reallyinsane. He thought that he simulated, but he is really insane--insaneat this very instant.

  After this poison has entered his soul, his condition can be easilyimagined. A terrible debate begins in his own mind, for he is fightingagainst himself for his own reason. Every argument that he can thinkof to persuade himself of his sanity he marshals; but there are plentyof arguments on the other side. The story is an excellent example ofwhat Merezhkovski must mean by the passion of thought.

  Another illustration of Andreev's uncanny power is seen in the shortstory "Silence." A father does not understand his daughter's silence,and treats her nervous suffering with harsh practicality. She commitssuicide; the mother is stricken with paralysis; silence reigns in thehouse. Silence. The father beseeches his wife to speak to him; thereis no speculation in her wide-open eyes. He cries aloud to his deaddaughter. Silence. Nothing but silence, and the steady approach ofmadness.

  Andreev is an unflinching realist, with all the Russian power of theconcrete phrase. He would never say, in describing a battle, that theRussians "suffered a severe loss." He would turn a magnifying glass oneach man. But, although he is a realist and above all a psychologist,he is also a poet. In the sketch "Silence" there is the very spirit ofpoetry. The most recent bit of writing by him that I have seen iscalled a Fantasy*--"Life is so Beautiful to the Resurrected." This isa meditation in a graveyard, written in the manner of one ofTurgenev's "Poems in Prose," though lacking something of that master'sexquisite beauty of style. It is, however, not sentimentallyconventional, but original. The poetic quality in Andreev animates allhis dramas, particularly "To the Stars."

  *Translated in "Current Literature," New York, for September 1910.

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  KUPRIN'S PICTURE OF GARRISON LIFE